Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

- "During the week to May 13, Germany's solar farms produced 17,531 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity, according to data from LSEG,"

This is an obviously wrong number, and I'm not even sure how they accomplished such a specifically weird mistake. "Mean of 17,351 MW" would be plausible. That's different by a factor of 168.

View on HN

Forgive me as I am one of those illiterate people - but if it is right to say: "By 2011, solar PV provided 18 TWh of Germany's electricity, or about 3% of the total" why is it not right to say the above?

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#History

(Or is the wikipedia article wrong too?)

I see that the parent has already addressed this in another comment and has edited their original statement, but I'll leave my question up - this helped me understand the difference:

https://www.tls-containers.com/tls-blog/understanding-mw-and....

Why is it obviously wrong?

During a duration of time it is okay so say an amount of energy (MWh) was produced, right?

Because it's a nonsensically small number; and it's contradicted with the graph immediately below it, that shows larger amounts of energy (MWh) generated in individual hours, than the supposed figure for the entire week. The peaks on the graph are ~40,000 MWh/hour sustained over multiple hours (eyeballing it). The amount generated in the entire week can't be 17,000 MWh, a number smaller than that.

(For anyone unclear about units: the y-axis of the graph is GWh/h, the same as 10^3 MWh/h, or simply just 10^3 MW. The unit [MWh] = 10^6 [Watt]*[hour]).

Yes, the units are correct. But currently Germany is generating 33 GW of solar power (according to electricity maps). Therefore the 17GWh is generated after 0.5 hrs. For a whole week this value is way too low, even if it was a cloudy week (which it wasn't).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com